What do you want for the Holidays? Eco-friendly legislation? Better schools? Subsidies for open source software? At the December 6th Providence Geeks Dinner, CitzenSpeak founder and Providence Geek Jo Lee will present their free email advocacy service for grassroots organizations.

Inspired by MoveOn email campaigns, CitizenSpeak offers a free way to let a lot of people tell someone that they’re mad as hell. By doing so, CitizenSpeak has enabled civic activists across the country to educate representatives about local and national issues, promote causes and build their lists. Recently listed in the Wall Street Journal as a recommended online tool for social change, CitizenSpeak and its developer, George Hotelling have won a number of prestigious awards, including the Tides Foundation award for the best open source software in the public space, and a Webby honoree award. The code that runs CitizenSpeak is available as a free module on Drupal.

Holiday Bonus: Jim Willis will talk about how CitizenSpeak can take advantage of the webservice API’s offered by the RI Secretary of State’s office.

Photo Credit: Bret A. Ancowitz, M.D. of Garris Photography

Wednesday, December 6, 2006, 5:30pm – 9pm+
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI

Providence Geeks, which first emerged in 2006, will be holding our last Geek Dinner of the year on December 6th. It promises to be a great one.

To reflect the spirit of the holidays, we’re going to switch things up a bit this month, and feature a “dotorg.” Providence-based CitizenSpeak founder Jo Lee will be presenting their award-winning, open source e-advocacy tools. (See follow-on post for details.)

Please RSVP in the comments section of this post so that we can give the good folks at AS220 an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ feed (see sidebar) and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin over at Gmail with your name and affiliation).

As always, for first-timers here are the details on the Geek Dinners:

• It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose whenever… And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities.


• Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.


• Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar.


• There is WiFi so bring your connected device of choice.


• We have AS220’s performance space from 5:30pm to approximately 7pm. After that the geekery moves to AS220’s adjoining cafe.

At the Providence Geeks Dinner earlier tonight, a large, enthusiastic crowd witnessed the unveiling of Flapjax—”a new programming language designed around the demands of modern, client-based Web applications.” Shriram Krishnamurthi led us through a fascinating demo-driven presentation. Suffice it to say, there were a lot of impressed geeks in the audience.

Flapjax is built entirely atop (and is syntactically identical to) JavaScript, and can thus run on traditional Web browsers without the the need for plug-ins or other downloads. The language has five essential features:

1. It is an event-driven, reactive language, ideal for writing browser-based client applications.


2. It provides a reactive, persistent store that automatically updates on all clients sharing the same data.


3. It enables convenient sharing of data with other users.


4. It implements access-control to channel this sharing.


5. It provides libraries to connect to external Web services (thereby enabling client-side mash-ups).

The Flapjax team timed tonight’s presentation with the launch of the official Flapjax web site, an extensive resource that features the online compiler, documentation, demos, tutorials, and more. I expect to hear a lot more about Flapjax in the coming months.

Update: As he notes in the comments below, Jim Willis has posted photos of last night’s event here.

The next Providence Geeks Dinner on Wednesday, October 11th at Brown’s CIT will feature the first public demonstration of Flapjax, a new programming language for building contemporary Web applications developed by a team Brown CS researchers.

The presentation will be by the core Flapjax team: Leo Meyerovich, Michael Greenberg, Gregory Cooper, Aleks Bromfield, and Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi.

Flapjax has five essential features:

1. It is an event-driven, reactive language, ideal for writing browser-based client applications.


2. It provides a reactive, persistent store that automatically updates on all clients sharing the same data.


3. It enables convenient sharing of data with other users.


4. It implements access-control to channel this sharing.


5. It provides libraries to connect to external Web services (thereby enabling client-side mash-ups).

Flapjax is built entirely atop (and is syntactically identical to) JavaScript, and can thus run on traditional Web browsers without the the need for plug-ins or other downloads.

If you’re running OS X, check out Library Books. It logs into your library account(s) and gives you a status menu in your menubar. The date sort is waaaaay better than PPL’s web interface. It should work with the Athenaeum (and RISD?) too. It’s free, but the author does have a paypal tip jar.